Showcase Metagov
Metagovernance Seminar Archive | 2025-10-21 | Unknown
Speaker 1: Eric is here with me. We formed a company called Overflow Labs, and we're developing a platform for game companies to be able to support open economies and player driven markets. Adrian and I have been involved in virtual economies for over twenty years, primarily in the MMO scale game space. What we have is you know, the the problem that game companies have had is this unmet player...
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Transcript
Speaker 1
0:00 – 0:00
Eric is here with me. We formed a company called Overflow Labs, and we're developing a platform for game companies to be able to support open economies and player driven markets. Adrian and I have been involved in virtual economies for over twenty years, primarily in the MMO scale game space. What we have is you know, the the problem that game companies have had is this unmet player demand for virtual assets, resulting in what we term shadow markets. They're effectively unsanctioned, secondary, trading platforms. And so our goal is to enable developers to directly support and sanction these markets. You will give we give players provable asset ownership and transfer. We can explore this, you know, uncharted territory that results that when players can create their own products and marketplaces freely, in the games that they love. So
Speaker 2
0:15 – 0:15
Yeah. Speaking of digital assets, some of you may have noticed that NFTs are blowing up. There's a lot of hype going around. NFTs, digital assets, what are they? How can we cash in on them? People are, like, trying to basically FOMO. They have this fear of missing out, so it's driving the prices up. And that's a good thing since it brings in a lot more eyes on digital assets and all the problems associated with them and all the things that they help out with. You know, we've been at getting gas as a company. You know? Are we going to be an NFT platform? Random investors have them hang us up on, like, LinkedIn, random avenues, because, you know, they wanna get it on the action. They have a fear of missing out. But but the whole thing
Speaker 3
0:30 – 0:30
mhmm. Sorry. To add to that, we're actually having an NFT anniversary NFT labeled, anniversary coins auction tied to our one year anniversary. We have famous artists, including some supermodels and other well known people participating. So you you guys are most welcome to, again, join us.
Speaker 2
0:45 – 0:45
Nice. Yeah. And if NFTs attract attention from all over the place. But the picture picture thing and the cool thing is that NFT or NFT like things have been around, you know, at least in digital form since at least the late eighties. For example, when me and Paul first met, we met in this game called Ultima Online and it was basically this virtual world. It was an RPG game and this virtual world had unlimited assets and this asset was land. You could place a house on this land, and, you know, which reduced the amount of land for other players to be able to interact with. So there's this whole supply and demand issue, and, you know, we popped down the castle on a nice piece of land inside this game, and then we were like, hey. There's a lot of people that wants this castle. Well, if we just put it up on eBay as an experiment. And to our surprise, the castle sold for, like, $3,000 to some random airline pilot out of Alaska. So, you know, that that was like an NFT like thing that brought in real value to both parties. The airline pilot wanted the castle in this game, and we're like, hey. We got some extra cash because we were broke college students at that time. So while all this NFT hype is good, you know, at Overflow, we will still continue on our original mission is to provide developers the tools they need in order to help drive player to player exchanges for goods and services. And over the next few months, we're gonna launch our MVP. We're gonna pilot test with a a few select studios, and that will help us identify problems, pain points, in developer and player defined driven economies. And that will help us figure out, and this is still up in there because nobody knows where this is going, how to navigate the government compliance aspects when we're talking about digital assets, because the government's wanting on the action also. So that's also another big question mark that we're gonna have to tackle tackle going forward.
Speaker 1
1:00 – 1:00
Yeah. So I also saw that Joshua asked a question, are we still planning on building death and taxes? We would love to build death and taxes. We really, really hope that we still get a chance to do it. Right now, like, we've, you know, been swamped with just the development of the platform. And so we'll see see what comes or whatever. But, you know, the the the first hand governance implications of allowing players to, like, define these these marketplaces is still, you know, absolutely fascinating to us. You know, anytime you you have an economy, whether it's sanctioned or not, there's always some form of governance that springs up or whatever. You know? We've talked about that before. So it's it's interesting also because, you know, Roblox just recently did an IPO, and, you know, I think they're the they're the first mainstream company to bring forward this idea that, you know, players or people can create their own types of games or whatever and monetize them in in in ways or whatever, you know, that we're hoping to, like, bring mainstream to traditional studios.
Speaker 4
1:15 – 1:15
Right. So just to get that straight, so what you guys are building is more of like a Roblox platform now where you're building helping other people to build their own games or their own economies on top of other games.
Speaker 1
1:30 – 1:30
Right. So, like, in order to build death and taxes, what what happened was we realized we had to build this platform to be able to support all these virtual economies and things like that. And then the feedback was that this would actually be really valuable for, like, normal developers as well. And so that's where our focus is at this moment in time. So
Speaker 5
1:45 – 1:45
Hello? Any
Speaker 6
2:00 – 2:00
other questions for Adrian or Paul? Okay. So next, I'll I'll turn it over to Ehud Shapiro, who previously gave a talk on digital social contracts.
Speaker 5
2:15 – 2:15
Okay. So first, I apologize. This is today is Israel Independence Day, so there are some ceremonies I popped out of, and I have to go back. So I,
Speaker 3
2:30 – 2:30
I have to go back. Yahoob. Congratulations.
Speaker 5
2:45 – 2:45
Thank you. Thank you. So I I gave a talk on digital social contracts, which was kind of a vision of of what what we would like to fix. If I can share can I share screen? Is this yeah. Okay. So that's if you can see that, our goal was to to fix our future digital society and our failing earthly democracies together. And I briefly, the report from since my talk a few months ago until now or almost a year ago maybe is that everything went in the wrong direction. So our feudal digital societies became even more frugal and our failing earthly democracies, except for The US, which turned for the better. At least in Israel, they're failing more miserably. And so I cannot report any any any actual progress, but I should say that my team what what what we what we realized the natural course of of events is has happened in my team, which is has very strong mathematical and and theoretical background. And also the fact that we we do want to develop systems and and methods which are well founded was that we go went deeper and deeper into into the theoretical foundations of of what are needed. And I'll show you a brief list of of our, kind of ongoing, ongoing work. Let let me see if I can find it here. Can you see this, screen? I'll also share the URL in the chat. So, basically, with the the problems will sound familiar, but the the but the questions that the our approach is probably quite different and radical from what's going on today. So we have a paper just came out on democratic forking, which is basically try to rationalize what's happening in cryptocurrencies, but not as a social process or as a a a a plutocratic process where the rich and powerful determine what's going on, but there's a democratic process for how how how forking can be rationalized as a as a democratic process. So that's an example of a paper. Let me just find the chat and I'll participants. Oh, I'm not sure where the chat button is right now. I'll I'll find it and and place the the the link later. Another another, problem which which may, again, sound familiar, but but we we look at it from from a foundational point of view is is what what in block in cryptocurrencies are called on chain governance. And, and we look at the theoretical foundations of how a constitution can be amended, within a constitution. And it turns out that even though this is a problem, has been thought about for for a few decades and and centuries even if we start from the American constitution, then it turns out that there's not much that can be relied upon and we we we then had had to to do a lot of foundational work and, and, which is reflected in in this paper. And, more generally, the the the questions that we we try to address are related to how to build what what are the building blocks, computational, mathematical, and eventually computational and software components that are needed to build digital communities which are self sovereign, democratic, egalitarian, where people participate in in in on an on an equal footing. I've just shared the link for for our papers. So those who want to get deeper are are welcome to do so. And those who want who may want to write me are are I'll be happy to to respond to any any comments and questions. But I should I should say that in contrast to the things that have been discussed here before and probably after, which are immediate, of immediate value and immediate interest, and maybe you can immediately make money out of them, then our work is is pretty foundational, theoretical, long term. And and given our goal of having a a Galatarian and just digital society, everything we do is open source and patented and aim to be used broadly. So so people who join my team must know that making money cannot be one of their goals, at least not as part of the work that they're doing we're doing together. So any questions on this? If you want me to get deeper into anything, I'll I'll I'll be happy to answer. Otherwise, I'll continue celebrating Israel's Independence
Speaker 3
3:00 – 3:00
One quick question, doctor Spiro, if I may. What is the situation in Israel with respect to remote voting? Can people vote from their smartphones if they are disabled or if they are overseas, for example?
Speaker 5
3:15 – 3:15
No. No. There's no digital no digital participation, only physical ballots. So and even not mailing. So people have to be physically in Israel and physically go to a ballot and physically put a note in in the ballot box.
Speaker 3
3:30 – 3:30
You bet. It's a long way to go. Long way to
Speaker 5
3:45 – 3:45
go. Well, yes and no. I think there are many, many issues with electronic voting which we can be discussed which can be discussed, you know, some other time.
Speaker 7
4:00 – 4:00
But
Speaker 5
4:15 – 4:15
I I I I think electronic voting is on the list of problems that Israel has to solve. Electronic voting is probably around 99 in the list or maybe even lower. So there's so many other more important problems we have to solve, including fixing our democracy. And and digital voting is not not the first one. Any other comments or questions?
Speaker 4
4:30 – 4:30
Just the just a quick question. Well, I guess I suppose two quick questions. One, when you talked about the building blocks, so that paper, was that are you referencing the original digital social contracts paper that you presented, like, a
Speaker 5
4:45 – 4:45
couple months? Yes. So so there is that paper, but we are actually gonna revise it. It turns out that the mathematicas the mathematics there were was unnecessarily complicated, and we have a new mathematical model which will be even simpler. But it to the to the average reader, it'll look the same. I mean, the paper if you if you look at it from, you know, two feet, it will look the same. Only if you if you dug dig deeper into the math, then then you'll see the differences. But structurally, conceptually, everything will the foundations are there. And when I when I talk about building blocks, the the main some key results we have works. One is about egalitarian, just cryptocurrencies. We have a couple of papers on them where we want to show that you can have egalitarian minting as a foundation which could be a foundation for UBI, for universal basic income as opposed to rich, rich future dynamics, which exist today in cryptocurrencies. And we, of course, democratic governance on chain or democratic governance is is is key goal for us. And to support that, you need genuine identifiers. So a lot of our work is devoted to that. And, for example, the the the the questions of community formation and and constitutional communities and forking are are also addressed. So there are so many things that need to be addressed and and and in from a foundational way, and it turns out that our hands are full with them. So until we deliver working software that implements all these, probably will take some time. We have a lot of theoretical mathematical work to do and and our papers are reflected. And you're welcome to read. And if if you want to contribute later, to to actual implementation, of course, all have to be appreciated.
Speaker 4
5:00 – 5:00
Like, on the actual implementation side, I can't remember where this this came up during the seminar or I remember talking to Luca after this afterwards about this. But, there were questions about, like, essentially what, like, what would the user experience of this things be? I was wondering if there's been progress more recently on, like, building or testing such a such kind of user experience.
Speaker 5
5:15 – 5:15
Well, we have at at the most abstract level, it's well, we have a program. It it to first approximation, it will look like users interacting with a smart contract. Okay? To a first approximation. And much of what we do can be realized by smart contract, but we want to do more and we want to do differently. And one of the things, we want to do differently is not is have the foundation that we that this builds upon the democratic and egalitarian as opposed to existing foundations for cryptocurrencies, which are plutocratic and nondemocratic and non egalitarian. So, and and comes with it slightly slightly richer math and and and language for describing, which is more distributed rather than centralized. But these are already kind of the finesse of computer science. But but to a first approximation, it will look like interacting with smart con with with, egalitarian and just, and democratic smart contracts. That's that's the first approximation. Okay. Thank you very much. I I really apologize that, I I when I accepted, I I forgot that that it's Independence Day. I said, sure. I'll take it because Wednesdays in the evening are free except today I'm not. So I'm sorry.
Speaker 3
5:30 – 5:30
Thank you so much.
Speaker 5
5:45 – 5:45
Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.
Speaker 6
6:00 – 6:00
Okay. And next, we have, Thomas Cox who previously gave a talk on, blockchain, governance working group at IEEE that he's been leading.
Speaker 7
6:15 – 6:15
And before that, I think I gave you a talk on the, Jungian archetypes in play in governance, which really deserves a revisit, but maybe not today. So, yeah, Thomas Cox. I chair p two one four five, which is the IEEE Standards Association's blockchain governance the standards group. We say blockchain, we actually mean DLT. Several of our members keep saying, my product isn't a blockchain. So but blockchain gets all the press and all the love, so we have to keep that in the name. So what what I was planning to do is give you a quick flyby of a bunch of stuff that's jumbling around in my head. And then wherever the questions come from, that's the interesting thing, and we could talk about it. And if none of it's interesting, we can just be done with you very quickly. So there are a couple things that are on my on my mind. One of which is that standards matter and how and why do standards matter for something like distributed governance. My claim is that we need a shared vocabulary much earlier than we need almost any other kind of standard, and there's six kinds of standards. Number two, I'm just getting very pessimistic about digital identity, and so I'm staking out, an extreme position and saying digital identity is the last thing you should want to provide or try to provide. I'll try to defend that thesis. I think you're better off settling for a probability cloud. Governance grows in predictable ways. We've got some work on a life cycle diagram that might be interesting to some folks, and I'm gonna claim that ontology recapitulates phylogeny, and I think I even know what those words mean. And, of course, everything starts as a dictatorship, which no one here will be surprised at. And then lastly, I have a thesis that the product of governance isn't decisions, which I've been saying it was decisions for, like, three years, and so I've changed my position on that. Rather, it's legitimacy. And I wanna mention Coleman's Authority Systems. So let's look at that. So I wanted to start with the the Cynefin framework, which I think most folks here have already seen. And if not, it's easy to Google. Cynefin being a Welsh word. That's why it's pronounced Cynefin, but spelled the way it's spelled. And so my my belief is that in the realm of chaos and, you know, cause and effect have broken down, that standards aren't gonna be even possible. And that as we fall out of chaos into the merely wildly complex where we're trying to make sense of things, the best thing we can do from a standards perspective is try to come up with terminology so that we can share our experiences and share our emergent practices as we discover them, and that any other attempt to standardize in a complex universe is probably fraught with risk. As the complex universe gets wrestled into more and more control through deeper understanding, it becomes more simply complicated, simply, where rather than having emergent practices, we can start finding good practices. And so we can get into the more modest standard levels of guides and practices. My the six types of standard are from the, the American Society for Testing and Materials or ASTM. And it is only when we get a world of simplicity and real cause and effect and best practices are possible that the remaining three types of standards, test methods, specifications, and classifications, start to make sense. And I can draw I can show you this in a different way using, Simon Wardley's, diagramming method. Some of you are familiar with Wardley maps. If you're not, you should. It's a very good system. And he suggests that all products go through an evolutionary movement from being what he calls Genesis, first person in the world to make one of these things through a custom build phase, into a product phase, and eventually into sort of a commodity or utility phase. And as that happens, you go from chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable into highly known, measured, stable, and dull. And product standards can hurt you when you're all the way to the left, and they can start to help when you get more and more to the right. In fact, they become mandatory as you get far to the right because, another wordly ism, is to see how layers get built. And so, you know, the Parthian battery was the first time humans made an object that could hold electrons and begin to harness electricity, and then over time, that turned into a commodity where you just plug things into a wall and you pay by the month. And there's your commodity electricity. And as electricity becomes more and more of a commodity, it becomes possible to hand build a z three or some other computer and become the first computer on the planet or electronic computer anyway. And then computing becomes a commodity as it is today in in cloud computing. And as computers got went from left to right and became more of a product and more standardized, now you can build the very first database, and now databases are a commodity. As you see, these layers build on each other, and now commodity databases are powering things like intelligent agents, and then they'll eventually become a commodity too, unleashing yet more layers of who knows what coolness over time and risk, of course. And the point here is that standards on the far left are gonna be counterproductive. By the time you're getting into product creation, you need a standard vocabulary even though you there's really no room for anything else, But you actually can't build the next layer on the far right unless you got standards because you need reliable components that you can build on and not have to think about. And that's where standards, I think, really come into their own in terms of empowering innovation, is they they play a cleanup role of letting you wrap stuff under an API or some kind of layer of abstraction and not have to worry about stuff anymore. And I'm sure I will upset at least one person in the room when I suggest that, you know, how good does identity really need to be from an evolutionary perspective? Am I just categorizing entities into the three f's of food, foe, or mating opportunity? Or am I trying to actually remember the, you know, the individuals that are around me and favors that I owe or they owe me and potential for future reward threat on an individual cooperative basis? And as long as I can solve my personal needs for figuring out that, that may be all the, quote, unquote, identity I need. As we try to create blockchain based systems of shared reality, if you try to give everybody one identity, you're gonna start running into every corner case on the planet. And it might be simpler to say, how much identity do I need for my purposes right now, and how can I design systems that satisfy the absolute minimum identity needed by the players involved and no more? So I'm I'm arguing against the one true identity given by a government and more for a highly decentralized and ad hoc system of providing enough identity for folks to get on with life, which would, I think, lend itself more to, well, a decentralized world. And, again, I'm happy to be wrong. I'm also happy to defend that. Life cycle, This is illegible, but I have some zoom ins. Big picture here, there's a governance design process that I think I've identified in blue, governance maturity phases that match that in red, and then some governance artifacts in the center. This is usually permissioned stuff. So let's zoom in a bit. I'm not sure if that's even legible. But there's sort of a strategy phase in design where you're trying to come up with your preconstitution decisions about, like, well, what's the purpose of this project? And, you know, how will skin be put into the game and what economic value will be created and so forth, and then constitution decision making and legislative decision making, and these artifacts start to show up. And off on the right, I suggest that there's, you know, some fairly immature governance at first because it's just you or you and some buddies, and eventually, you need to turn that into something where people feel a sense of buy in. And as you go further, you know, time is flowing downward in this rather unconventional diagram. And at some point on the maturity side, you have to have an end to your cabal leadership and more of a participatory game. Otherwise, you're not really decentralized. You're just a service provider. At some point, you got your first production usage of your system. And then after that, on the right, I'm gonna suggest that there's a sort of a late scaling cutover where, like, VeChain gives up control to its members or Cardano gives up control and so forth. Maybe an easier way to show this interchange is now time is going left to right. Sorry. I'm flipping things. I'm suggesting there's a depth of commitment where the visionary founder and the cofounder are the first ones in, and they have very deep commitment because they're spending all this time inventing things. And then you're cocreating early stakeholders, a little less deep, but still pretty deep in the in terms of commitment because they have to do a lot of decision making. And at some point, you've got your initial governance comes online, and the people who join after that are your early majority in the sense of, you know, diffusion of innovation curve type thinking. And so they've still got some commitment, but it's not as deep. And mostly, they want a level playing field and a clear offer of, like, what am I joining here and what good is it gonna do me? And then you get your late majority stakeholders who show up, you know, near near the end. Meanwhile, there's a layer of transactional customers across the top who I I will claim ought to have no voice in government or governance because their choice is to either work with you or go somewhere else. And only when this becomes a monopoly, should they have a voice. And there's also a spot here for people who all they do is stake or all they do is integrate an API. They don't do any other real investment into the system, so they have very little skin in the game, and I would claim that their rights to decision making power should be fairly light. And then the fourth thing I wanted to throw out for general thinking is, what's the output of governance? And I'm gonna claim it's not decisions. It's legitimacy. I think it was somebody here in this group suggested Coleman's authority systems paper from 1980. Pretty dense. It'd be one of the things he mentions is there's two things that members or potential members of an authority system, including a blockchain, including a decentralized collective can do. One is vest or join, the other is divest or leave. And within the system, we've got positions of authority, maybe. If we do have positions of authority, they're usually roles assigned to agents, and the system itself generally wants to achieve some sort of outcome and attract and retain members. So the governance system has to not alienate members or else it won't attract and retain them, and the governance system cannot appear corrupt or it'll fail all of its goals. Okay. So I apologize for that whirlwind tour of the inner recesses of my brain, but I'm wondering if anything jumps out at anybody, could you type it into chat, and then we can either talk about it or move on to the next person. Thank you for, letting me play.
Speaker 6
6:30 – 6:30
Yeah. Thank you. I I just wondering, you know, with standardization, and I guess you could speak to this in sort of any of the ways of representing the life cycle that you had. But in standardization, there are sort of various ways that standards get formed. There's, you know, the I, triple E, sort of, consensus based model. But there are also standards that are formed just because they become the de facto industry standard, and it's just, you know, one company is so far out ahead that, essentially, like, it just forecloses any ability. So I'm just wondering in this sort of life cycle diagram, sort of, like, when you see the opportunity or necessity for standards to develop.
Speaker 7
6:45 – 6:45
Yeah. Right. My guess is that we're not gonna see in in the decentralized governance space any vendor lock in. I think the technology platforms are just a little too scattered for us to be seeing that, and governance is such a detached layer from that. I mean, you can use almost any governance scheme with almost any technology within limits. And people jealously safeguard their right to opt out of systems. So when it comes to governance, I I really am not too worried about any kind of vendor lock in. What I am seeing is a real sort of explosion of different terms to mean the same basic thing, making it very hard for different projects to talk to each other or members of different projects to hold meaningful communication. And so we're actually working on a set of early definitions of key terms with their synonyms to try to walk people through, you know, here's how governance tends to play out, and here's all different words people use to mean basically the same thing. And what we what we're what we're facing is more of a we wanna be following the other projects to see what words they already use because there's no point in making up brand new words when you've got existing words people use. And then if we have to sort of merge things, we'll do our best to guess what would work for folks. But when it comes to language, everyone, like it's very hard to be the language police. Like, the French and the Turks try to do that. They both have government agencies that define what is French and what is Turkish, and they have a hard time actually making anyone believe them. And English famously has no central body of authority. I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary folks just basically said, we're gonna track what how people use the language. We're not gonna try to tell them what they should do, and that's we're very close to that. We're gonna do our best to with p two one four five is to track actual usage and then codify that and make it available and popularize it and share it as widely as we can and try to hope that people want to do a shelling point conversion on a set of terms so they can have, meaningful dialogue. Wish us luck.
Speaker 6
7:00 – 7:00
Will do. So I I'm sort of mindful of time because we do have other speakers, but it does look like Nicholas and and John have, have questions. So perhaps we could briefly cover those.
Speaker 7
7:15 – 7:15
Okay. Let's see. Fair launch networks and upload a product. Could have a framework, David Snowden, keynote speaker for yeah. Snowden is flipping genius. Any chance you get to go listen to David Snowden? I would urge anyone to take that.
Speaker 8
7:30 – 7:30
His recent work is on crisis management, and so that's why he's kind of doing the circuit and why we're lucky enough to have him at complexity weekend. So if anybody wants to learn more, just talk to me before or after the weekend.
Speaker 7
7:45 – 7:45
That's brilliant. And let's see. Consumers don't need steak, except when there's a monopoly. Yeah. Nick, you may have to walk me through your question a little bit.
Speaker 9
8:00 – 8:00
May maybe I'm I'm misquoting you, but I thought I remembered you saying that this sort of the external layer in your in your chart there.
Speaker 7
8:15 – 8:15
Yeah. I was suggesting that a transactional customer, I wouldn't give them a stake in a system or or governance rights in a system if they've already exercising free choice over multiple vendors in a relatively free or somewhat unconstrained market, even a duopoly. It's only when the choice to switch providers is harder and harder does it make sense to, I think, expect of them the burden of governance because being involved in governance is a pain in the butt, and if any of you live in a condo and have a homeowners association. But try to imagine having 82 homeowners associations that you belong to all of them, and you have to somehow weigh in on all of them because you've got decentralized governance for the electric system and the gas system and all these different cloud providers providing you with different services. And somehow you have stake in all of them because it's all decentralized. And now I gotta show up at committee meetings. It's like, come on, man. I'm trying to, like, buy toothpaste here. I'm not trying to, you know, spare me because we we we've all got limited cognitive load capabilities, and governance is a big cognitive load. So, I mean, you can try to get all your transactional customers in there and give them governance rights, but, you know, a, you run the risk of getting Boaty McBoatface. Some of you have heard the story. There there was a popular vote for how to name Arctic exploration ship, and they threw it out to the British public. And the far and away vote winner wasn't, like, the Hermes or some, you know, boat like name. It was Boaty McBoatface.
Speaker 9
8:30 – 8:30
You've brought that up before, but I think
Speaker 7
8:45 – 8:45
that's It's one of my favorite stories. I think
Speaker 9
9:00 – 9:00
you do for the opposite reason.
Speaker 7
9:15 – 9:15
Well, I know it's opposite. I mean, it's like, hey. You you want the public to name stuff? We'll go with funny. You know? Whatever captures the imagination. And they don't care if it makes the people on the boat feel stupid or or, you know, the people who donated a million dollars feel like they got ripped off. It's like, hey. You asked for my vote. I gave you my vote. What did you want? And we also sent Taylor Swift to a a college for the deaf, which I thought
Speaker 9
9:30 – 9:30
Just quickly, what does it look like to add that participation in afterwards when it hadn't been designed? Like, now suddenly, you don't have consumer choice. Now you have to add that in. Well, how does that work?
Speaker 7
9:45 – 9:45
Well, I I might give you a prediction. I'm not saying that there's one true way it ought to work. But most likely, the population who are the monopoly cons consumers of a monopoly provided service are gonna be very anxious about being gouged as they should be, and are very likely to turn to whatever their terrestrial government is and say, so public utility commission, what do you say? And all of their elected representatives will salute because there's votes to be had, and your monopoly provider will become a regulated entity, which is probably not a bad thing to have happen. By the way, when things get all the way to the right on the wordly map sorry. All the way to the right on the wordly map, the margins shrink to near zero, And you get intense competition and little bits of innovation and a lot of, you know, lean six sigma kind of squeezing pennies out. So it's it's not a place of dynamism. It's a place of just rock solid stability, and no one even thinks about electricity until the lights go off. Right? That that's what the service turns into. And you've got people who make their careers getting a master's in, you know, electrical distribution, and they go and work for the electric company for twenty years and get a pension, and all they do is keep the power going. You know, we're gonna see a lot of that, more and more not just electricity and plumbing, but compute and and other virtual services.
Speaker 6
10:00 – 10:00
Okay. Thank you, Thomas. Next, we have Ofer Chernotrochovsky, who previously well, has given a few different talks. So I'll let him go ahead and summarize what he's he's gonna cover.
Speaker 10
10:15 – 10:15
Okay. Hi. So I'll start quickly with the slideshow. So I'm just going to quickly talk about the work that we are going to publish soon in Nathan's special issue. And my collaborator here is also Seth, who is here, and Nori Jacobi from Max Planck, and Dalton Conley from Princeton. And I'm going to focus on experimenting these feedback systems. And the first question is, why should you experiment experiment with those? And the obvious answer is that many of our everyday decisions now are guided via crowdsource ratings that are essentially feedback systems. And if you think about governance and the future of distributed governance in particular, then feedback system should be important because you can think about feedback system evolving into continuous voting system, which are practically where the popular votes are going to guide the investments in public goods and food resources. The trouble with all of that is that, feedback system are many times unreliable, and that's not only because people are not being honest, but because people turn to be lazy, free ride, and provide low quality information. And then, you know, you present bad information, and you have stupid collective decisions. So the kind of problems that we are dealing with are problem of crowd wisdom, namely the quality of collective decisions and cooperation that usually people study separately in a very narrow aimed experiments. But I kind of like try to advocate more ecological way of thinking about it dynamically, namely that the crowd wisdom and the corporation affect each other. And the question is how? Crowd wisdom itself relates to the quality of the signaling, but also to how you aggregate that signal. And cooperation, of course, is an outcome of how many people choose to free ride or defect. But how to look at that more ecologically and yet in an experimental system that allow you to get better distributed governance? And what we suggest in the paper that is upcoming is an experimental system, what we try to develop into a platform that we call ferry service game. And those are experiments in three d virtual worlds that get people an experience that is kind of like simulating real world situations. So from that point of view, people are making money. They need services to cross the lakes. They they have a feedback system that allowed them to communicate. They can also avoid the service. And once you manage to make something ecological, then you can present people with different worlds and let them choose where they want to live. And you can do it in a long term, you know, virtual world where people play over time, and the world themselves are evolving based on how people behave in them. And once you have an experimental system like that, when you can actually shift all those parameters of how people share information and what governance layers you add to it, then you may be able to optimize them a little bit. So if you go to I put a little demo of our system in u311.org ferry service game. I'm going to quickly show you how it works. So you can build, you know, an array of different world from that point of view. For example, I'm just going to show you a quick demo where you allow people a bridge that avoid the services altogether. In the information that they share, you can, in this case, just emulate it as a noisy system. And you can also make the rating more expensive in terms of time of seconds you have to wait. And then within seconds, you have a world, and then people make money. This is real money that people collect. And then they have to choose either to use a ferry or a bridge, and it's up to them and say that you choose the ferry. And then you have two services, and maybe you take the one that is more highly rated, but it's actually not such a good ferry because maybe the rating information was a bit noisy. So you maybe get upset a little bit because you're losing time that you could use to collect to make money. So the service is delayed. But then you have to decide, am I going to also spend time rating it? And again, you have to wait. And then you have the the features of the device itself. And finally, you may say, well, that's all maybe too much. Maybe I'll just take the bridge and not even participate in the information ecosystem. So so that's give you a feeling to the low level, but on the highest level, we are running those, you know, large scale online and then, of course, in a higher level, you know, then a player that you recruit, you know, can go to the green islands or to the red islands or to yellow islands and then choose where they want to stay. And, where we are going to take that is, first of all, optimization at the lowest level of how you get people to cooperate more and how you get people to give you better information, but also try to add layers of governance that will be kind of related to the kind of thing that Amy is going to talk about next. Namely, what happen if you put a lever layer of governance and you have a game that has, say, two groups of players, those who collect the coins and those who makes the coins and and and drive the fairies. And then you can run experiments that really emulate, and and, you know, situations that you want to optimize in a way where mistakes are very low. So that that's the kind of direction where we are trying to go. That that's it. I just want to thank my collaborators.
Speaker 6
10:30 – 10:30
Any any questions for Ofer? I'm I was just wondering, to the extent that sort of the goal here is to improve the ability of feedback systems to have effective governance. Like, there seems to be a distinction between sort of things you're doing that are just foundational, like doing this in a virtual world and, you know, actually sort of having skin in the game by, you know, making money and that sort of thing. And but it also seems as though there are aspects of it that involve sort of having folks experiment and come up with different feedback diff different dimensions that then change the feedback system. So I was just wondering if, like, you had wondered about that distinction or had any thoughts on that. Absolutely.
Speaker 10
10:45 – 10:45
I mean, that's why we don't want to think about one virtual world, but about a family of virtual worlds, and also we want to connect it to singular experiments that don't have virtual worlds in them and to see where you need. Because in most of the experiments, you have, like, a cerebral task,
Speaker 5
11:00 – 11:00
like a
Speaker 10
11:15 – 11:15
game that you play, like a board game, which is very different than when you just live your life and take the subway or get a cab. And we don't really know how those ecological system change how information is really given. And in effect, what I like to think about is systems that that just give you the level of complexity that you need, but not less than that. And, so optimizing can be done at any level. It can be done on the rating device that can have a little friction in it or how you share information. Do you show people trends or do you just show people current situation? But most important, you know, what kind of channels of interaction will give you either a social collapse or or or a virtues, a feedback that takes you up in terms of I do believe that government has to make decisions. And if you want to have a a system that is fully distributed and you want those decision to be less silly, people need to be educated via the feedback system. So what you want people is not just to play once, but to feel the consequences of their actions on a day to day basis. So to me, this would be like a system is really an educational system where you keep screwing up and learning from the feedback as opposed to what we call now politics are things that have no feedback and no learning in them, which is almost the definition of political issues.
Speaker 6
11:30 – 11:30
Any any other questions? Okay. I think Amy, we were looking at perhaps having her present at another session once there have been some other developments on PolicyKit. So, and we only have a a few minutes left, but perhaps, Josh, if you wanna give a brief update on gov base.
Speaker 4
11:45 – 11:45
Yeah. Happy to. One second. Let me pull up the project plan. One way. I wanna talk about this one. So there's a lot of different stuff happening in gun based right now. But I can mention the let's say, the three or four sort of main projects that we're working on, and then talk about a little bit about the other data facets. So the main kind of, like, two things or three things, let's say, that we're kind of focused on developing right now are support for ethnographic workflows. So Prima, Eli, Winnie at RMIT, well, Eli and her team, including Kelsey and Campbell, Shulei who's at, I think, Imperial, Kevin and his team at Wharton. They're all kind of doing, let's say, more qualitative data collection around governance. And this kind of focuses more on crypto governance, just because of the people kind of involved. But in principle, the data models we build and the sort of, like, the connectors would be reusable for, arbitrary online communities beyond just blockchains and DAOs. Anyways, so we're building kind of a various tables and sort of, like, pipelines to support that kind of extra graphic data collection and trying to actually collect some of that dataset. Where the relevant integration we're targeting and kind of like we where we've currently organized Go base is, for those who, you know, the last time we presented, we talked about, you know, there's lots of tables that we're kind of implementing such have been implemented. And right now, as we're building new tables, rather than build new ones on our own,
Speaker 7
12:00 – 12:00
we're trying to target existing datasets
Speaker 4
12:15 – 12:15
that already exist out there that maybe aren't geared or tailored to, you know, online communities and target those for integration so that we can sort of more easily facilitate, on and offline, comparisons of on and offline forms of governance. So Participedia is a really lovely datasets, of around 1,700 different, let's say, cases, events, and sort of democratic experiments, experiments in participatory democracy. Most of the folks on offline communities and what we like to do is facilitate comparisons between the gov dataset and participedia, and this is something we're working with them right now to kind of to do. They actually the participedia people actually just got, like, $2,500,000 grant to facilitate exactly sort of those kinds of integrations. So that'd be quite exciting. We're also building what we're calling the governance surface. This is essentially, a list of let's say, you know, take a service like Loomio or a service like SourceGrid. They will often surface, you know, set of API endpoints. So these are the concrete ways of interacting with that digital service. And what we like to do is map that set of endpoints or, let's say, like, actual configurable configurable parameters, to these, to these different sort of software platforms and digital services to, let's say, like, actual let's say, like, a canonical representation of what those things do. So, like, you could imagine mapping Loomio and Snapshot and, I don't know, like liquid voting, dot co to a common voting module that sort of, like, gives you, like, this common canonical interface for dealing or interacting with voting different voting services. So that's another one we're kinda leading. And then there's the sort of older project around constitutions, which is still ongoing. We're continuing to develop connections with constitute slash CCP dataset. And, yeah. And there's now another one that's currently being coded up, another constitution. And the ultimate goal of this is to emit a a standard for digital constitutions. So, yeah, that's where gov base some of the most recent work is centered around. There's a lot of other stuff. If you're interested in participating, I would just recommend joining the hashtag gov base channel in the in the MediGOV Slack.
Speaker 6
12:30 – 12:30
Thanks. Any, any questions for Josh? We have a couple minutes left. Okay. Well, I'll give everyone a few seconds to unmute and we can, thank both Josh as well as all the other, mini presenters, for their, talks today. So three, two,
Speaker 5
12:45 – 12:45
one.
Speaker 6
13:00 – 13:00
And I would also mention we had a few folks that I invited who we didn't, have an opportunity to get to, so we were thinking about doing another session at the May or early June. But I'd be I think we'd be interested in your feedback on sort of this format and, did you think it worked well or do you have suggestions or would you like to do a a short presentation? So, feel free to message in the seminar planning Slack or just message me or however you want to communicate. So, really appreciate all the speakers, and look forward to talking to you all further.